October 09, 2017

Six years ago Macy's turned down Venerable Mom's application for a credit card, despite her good credit history and enviable financial status. I wrote about it here.

This week VM received an invitation to apply for a Platinum Visa card from a more local institution, which acknowledged her good credit and years as a customer. I wrote a response on her behalf:

I received the solicitation that you directed to my mother, Venerable Mom Laquedem, to apply for a Greatest Bank Visa Platinum Card, and the recognition of her good credit that your offer implies. Mom was very proud of her sterling credit history – I think her last late payment on anything was in 1953 – and she reacted with chagrin in 2011 when Macy’s turned her down for a credit card, something she and I couldn’t explain, given her substantial private income and complete freedom from debt. I think at the time her debts totaled $674, the amount of her charges that month on her credit card, and she had then lived for 15 years without a home mortgage and 50 years without a car payment.

She’s not, unfortunately, able to accept your offer, because in the fall of 2013 she died, quite peacefully and still debt-free. She’d likely be cheered by your offer, almost as much as she’d have reveled in the news that Macy’s has closed the store that invited her to apply for a credit card and then rejected her as unworthy of the honor.

September 15, 2017

Some years ago, here in Portland, two businessmen had a disagreement. One said to the other, "If you don't settle this dispute on my terms, I will sic my lawyers on you and they will tie you up in court for years. It will be the worst experience that you've ever had!" The other smiled benignly, and replied, "I was in Auschwitz for a year. What can your lawyers do that's worse?"

They settled, mostly on the second man's terms.

Auschwitz was one of the three concentration camps in which the second man had been imprisoned. He survived to come to Portland, raise a family, and enjoy a successful business career. Today he celebrates something that in Nazi Germany in 1944 must have seemed impossible to him: his 90th birthday.

It's now 2017, and the second man is celebrating something that in 1944 must have seemed not only impossible but inconceivable: his 99th birthday.

August 04, 2017

The unlikely life of Theodosios T. Tzantarmas began in 1936 in Thessaloniki, the second-largest city in Greece and one with a lively reputation for challenging the government: it was the locus of the original Young Turks, who started the revolution that ultimately overthrew the Ottoman Empire. Not everyone born in Thessaloniki becomes a revolutionary, but neither does everyone born there become a boxer, a pipefitter, a tavern owner, and a thorn in the side of city government. In his 81 years, T.T. Tzantarmas, known as "Saki," did all of those things.

Most of his Portland friends knew Saki Tzantarmas, who died in Portland on July 20, as the owner of the New Copper Penny Bar & Grill, a rambling establishment devoted to drinking, betting, and celebration that until last year dominated the interchange of Interstate 205 and Foster Road. Even people who never stepped inside recognized its sign as a Portland landmark, with its copper-colored profile of Abraham Lincoln in the style of a one-cent piece. Why a penny and not a dollar? Mr. Tzantarmas came to this country, he said, without a dollar -- but he did have five pennies in his pocket.

By 1960 he had made his way to Portland, where he was working as a pipefitter, and the stories began. He told friends that he had boxed professionally, and an image from 1965 shows Saki with noted Mexican welterweight Gaspar Ortega - but his boxing record at boxrec.com identifies him in just one match, with Don Marshall at the Portland Armory, which he lost in a technical knockout.

Boxing was not Saki's future, though he retained the fighter's stance and build the rest of his life. A few years after his boxing match he bought a rundown tavern, which he named the Copper Penny. When the business was forced to relocate in 1973, he moved the tavern to Southeast Foster Road just east of 92nd Avenue, renaming it the New Copper Penny.

Saki himself lived a life of contradictions. Expressive verbally, he disliked writing. Elegant in dress when he wished -- he could make a purple tie look impressively masculine -- he could also appear in the New Copper Penny looking like a patron who was about to be thrown out, instead of as the owner who even in his late 70s could still do the throwing. Thrifty in business -- some might say tightfisted -- he was personally generous to friends and family, quietly helping friends in need. Even his family name carried its own puzzle: nominally Greek, it might have derived from the Italian surname Zantani, or from a similar Turkish name.

As he expanded his business onto the entire block on Foster Road, he built the contradictions of his own life story into the New Copper Penny. The oldest part of the business was a clean plain room with a concrete floor, stark like the Greece of his youth. A middle section contained the off-track betting parlor and video poker machines, a nod to the practicalities of running a tavern in Oregon. And a dilapidated passage with fraying carpet led to the elegant Pantheon Room (pictured here), a classically-decorated banquet hall, with Greek pillars lining the walls, reminiscent of the ancient glory of his homeland.

Under pressure from the Portland Development Commission to get out of the way of gentrification, Saki sold the New Copper Penny site, and the tavern, club, and banquet hall closed last year to make way for apartments.

An old story tells of the man who came to this country with nothing, started a business, became a success, and sent his son to college to become an accountant. After graduating, the son examined the father's books and told his father that he couldn't tell from the books what the father's profit was. The father said, "I came to this country with five dollars. Take five dollars out of the till. Everything else you see is the profit." When Willamette Week interviewed Saki Tzantarmas in 2014, he pulled five copper pennies out of his pocket and showed them to the reporter. The five coins were what he had brought to America sixty years ago. Everything else -- his family, his friends, his property, and his story -- was the profit that he shared with the city that he adopted. It would be a fitting memorial to T.T. Tzantarmas if, somewhere in the foundation of the monolith that is replacing the New Copper Penny, the developer would embed five copper pennies.

May 25, 2017

A challenge to President Trump's executive order to bar citizens of certain Muslim-dominant nations from visiting the United States came before the Fourth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, which issued its opinion today blocking the president's travel ban. The opinion goes on at some length, but all that a constitutionalist need pay attention to is the opening, written by Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory:

The question for this Court, distilled to its essential form, is whether the Constitution, as the Supreme Court declared in Ex Parte Milligan (1866), remains "a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace." And if so, whether it protects Plaintiffs' right to challenge an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination. Surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment yet stands as an untiring sentinel for the protection of one of our most cherished founding principles - that government shall not establish any religious orthodoxy, or favor or disfavor one religion over another. Congress granted the President broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute. It cannot go unchecked when, as here, the President wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation.

The carrier has hit on a compelling sales pitch. I would pay well for a new iPhone on which I could call Venerable Mom Laquedem, if she would answer. I can speak to her -- she occupies a handsome brass container above my fireplace -- but it's been several years since she last talked back.

March 23, 2017

I enjoy reading the descriptions of natural history that condense the life of the universe into the scale of a single year, sometimes called the Cosmic Calendar, so that if the Big Bang happened on January 1, the solar system formed on September 2, life on Earth started on September 21, fish appeared on December 17, the ice age ended on December 31 at 11:59:33 p.m, and so on. I also appreciate the similar scaling of the federal income tax and the concept of Tax Freedom Day, the day of the year on which the nation has earned total income equal to its federal and state income tax burden. It's in late April.

Something I read inspired me to condense income taxes and the federal budget into a single workweek -- the Laquedem Cosmic Federal Budget Workweek. Imagine that your annual work and income are condensed into a single workweek of five 8-hour days, each running from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (For this exercise, skip lunch and breaks.) The tax freedom moment is Tuesday at 1:29 p.m., including state taxes. Your federal income tax freedom moment is Tuesday morning at 9:20 a.m.

But let's take this scale one step farther. If your income tax is allocated ratably among the $2.854 trillion (net of certain offsetting revenues including Social Security and Medicare taxes) that our federal government spends, for how much of the LCFBW are you working for which program?

The answer is that from 9:00 to 10:52:19 Monday you're working for the Defense Department, from 10:52:20 to 12:37:26 you're funding other discretionary spending, from 12:37:27 to 1:19:39 you're funding the interest on the national debt, from 1:19:40 to 2:24:08 you're funding Medicaid, and from 2:24:09 to 3:51:23 you're funding the gap between Social Security and Medicare tax revenues and expenses. For the rest of the Monday (remember, no breaks!) and 20 minutes Tuesday morning you're supporting everything else the government does that has some mandatory element, including SNAP (food stamps), federal and military retirement benefits, the earned income credit, some veterans' programs, and unemployment benefits, net of all offsetting revenue.

Mr. Trump proposes to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. How much of your workweek goes to support those three programs? Last year the federal government funded public broadcasting with $445 million and sent about $150 million each to NEH and NEA. On the Laquedem Cosmic Federal Budget Workweek scale, one minute equals $5.708 billion and one second equals $95 million. The answer, then, is that the $745 million for those three programs together correspond to about eight seconds of your workweek. If you read at a respectable 300 words per minute, in the time it took you to read this post you funded your share of the three programs twelve times over. Now get back to work.

They may wish to review the history of how the nation's tax burden has shifted from corporations to individuals. In the early years of the federal income tax, the burden lay about evenly on individuals and corporations. In eight of the first ten years, the government actually collected more from corporations than from individual taxpayers. That tenth year -- 1943 -- was the last year in which the United States government collected more income tax from corporations than from individuals ($9.56 billion from corporations and $6.51 billion from individuals).

The last year in which corporations paid as much as two-thirds as individuals was 1954 ($21.1 billion from corporations and $29.5 billion from individuals).

The last year in which corporations paid as much as half as individuals was 1967 ($34 billion from corporations and $61.5 billion from individuals).

The last year in which corporations paid as much as one-third as individuals was 2006 ($353.9 billion from corporations and $1,044 billion from individuals), and before that was 1977 ($54.9 billion from corporations and $157.6 billion from individuals).

March 02, 2017

On this day in 1919, when Tom Moyer was born in an upstairs bedroom of this unassuming building in Sellwood, his father, who had boxed as "Silk Hat" Harry Moyer, might have imagined that Tom would himself become a boxer some day, and so Tom did, being for a while the second-best amateur boxer in the United States. Harry Moyer might not have envisioned, however, that his son would go on to success in the business world as the founder of the Luxury Theatres chain, which grew to 190 screens before being acquired by Norman Lear's company Act III in 1988. (It's now part of the Regal Cinemas chain.) Nor would Harry Moyer have pictured his son becoming a Portland real estate tycoon, and then a quiet philanthropist who gave millions of dollars back to the city in which he lived and prospered, and donated the land and part of the construction cost for Director Park.

Late in Mr. Moyer's life, the city recognized his civic contributions, and some awards followed -- not many, for he disliked talking in public, even in the form of the words of gratitude that audiences expect honorees to utter from the stage. "Thank you very much" was one of his longer speeches.

In 2014, on the gray November morning on which he died in his downtown apartment, the city had one final farewell gift for Mr. Moyer: it ticketed his hearse.

March 01, 2017

I was not the first, or the second, or even the six hundredth person to be surprised by Amanda Fritz's decision to close her City Hall office and travel to Arizona with six of her senior staff to attend a three-day residential training session on diversity in the workplace, at a cost to the city of $4,750 per person plus travel costs, for a total cost to the city of about $40,000. Many of the raised eyebrows, including mine, arched skyward because White Men As Full Diversity Partners, the organization that will provide the diversity training, is headquartered in Portland a mere two miles from City Hall. (To be fair, the organization offers the residential training only in Arizona and Illinois, but not in Oregon.)

In 2011 the city created an agency, named the "Office of Equity and Human Rights," to educate city elected officials and their staff on issues of access, opportunity, race, and disability. Commissioner Fritz was the Council's strongest voice to support its creation. The Office has a staff of ten and provides mandatory training to all city employees. That Commissioner Fritz believes it valuable to take her staff out of town for three days or more to obtain diversity training that is readily available in Portland, from the same organization that's providing the training in Arizona, suggests that she believes that the Office of Equity and Human Rights is failing at its job. Else why would the additional training be necessary?

Sometimes I think that the Portland City Council does not understand that a dollar spent on Project A is a dollar that is not available to spend on Project B. This is one of those times.